


What if I was never there

by ThisCat



Category: One Piece
Genre: Ambigous post-Wano speculation, Found Family, Gen, Introspection, Memory Alteration, One Shot, Sibling Bonding, yes they're also actual siblings but the Charlottes be like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26706763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Snip, snip, snip,go the scissors, as Pudding cuts herself out of her mother's life.She won't be going alone.
Relationships: Charlotte Katakuri & Charlotte Pudding
Comments: 35
Kudos: 201





	What if I was never there

_Snip, snip, snip,_ go the scissors in methodical hands.

Pudding crouches over her oldest brother, her hair veiling her face.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ and she lets the sound be all she thinks about.

_Snip_ , and fuse the edges. _Snip, snip_ , and.

A miniscule hesitation, like her hand pulls through a strand of spider’s silk in the air.

Then _snip_ one last time.

She returns the roll of film to her brother’s head and is left with a bouquet of film fragments in her hand, each of them bearing the same face. She stands up.

There is only a single, massive bed in this hospital room, and it holds her mother.

Mama.

An emperor of the sea.

Pudding’s oh so beloved parent, and dictator.

Returned after a devastating defeat at Wano. Her _first_ true defeat, both in this age and the last.

The doctors say she’s lucky to still be alive. She’ll recover in only a few days, but for now, she’s unconscious.

Vulnerable. Pudding has never seen that before. It’s dangerous, for everyone.

Which is why Perospero was with her, watching over her, but now he’s on the floor, sleeping, equally helpless.

It was simple.

In the end, they’re all human. The brain sleeps to organize their memories. It’s only logical they’ll fall asleep after having their memories changed to such a degree.

Pudding sits down at the edge of her mother’s bed and holds her breath for a moment against the rush of fear.

But nothing happens.

She lets the breath out and reaches a hand into her mother’s head.

It’s a long roll of film to unspool. Charlotte Linlin has lived a long and eventful life.

There’s no need to roll all the way back to the beginning, of course, but Pudding is a terrible sneak, and she’s not in a rush.

She can’t be in a rush. If she rushes, she’ll think about why she’s rushing, and she can’t do that, so she gives into curiosity and winds her mother’s memory back as far as it goes to skim through it.

Maybe there’s answers.

There are.

Maybe it’ll help her understand.

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t, but it keeps her distracted from listening for footsteps until the door opens and her most dangerous brother steps in.

Katakuri freezes in the door, brows furrowed in a scowl or a frown, looking down at her from behind his scarf.

Pudding freezes where she sits at their mother’s side, roll of film in one hand and pair of scissors in the other, looking back.

“Pudding,” he says, finally, his voice not a warning, not surprised, simply neutral. “What are you doing?”

Pudding doesn’t know how to answer. She has no front to fall back on here, only the truth.

“I just want to leave,” she says, and she didn’t know it would be pleading until it is. “I need to leave, but she won’t let me. She’ll chase me to the end of the sea unless I do this so she doesn’t remember there’s anything to chase.”

He closes the door and walks closer, still not hostile, only calm and curious, but Pudding knows better than anyone that in this place, intentions are rarely apparent.

“Our brother too?” he asks, outwardly unconcerned.

“It was easier that way. When he wakes up, he’ll remember being more tired than he should have been and falling asleep on his own.”

Katakuri nods.

He stands there, arms crossed, looking at her still sitting frozen at their mother’s side. Looking at their mother, his eyebrows going even lower for a moment.

“Can you do that for others than yourself?” he asks.

Her hand twitches on the scissors. Her mind twitches in her head.

“What do you mean?”

And Katakuri, their strongest, unflappable brother, who never shows weakness and never falters, sighs, and sits on the floor leaning back against their mother’s bed.

“You are not the only one who wants to leave this place.”

There are things that make sense, and there are things that don’t.

Lately, it seems the world is filled by a large majority of the second category.

“Who, then?” she asks. “Not you. It can’t be.”

He looks at her through the corner of his eye, and there might be a smile there, but she cannot tell.

“Not only me. There’s a few of us. There always has been. Now is the time for it.”

His eyes crinkle as he speaks. Is there kindness there? She hasn’t seen it often enough to recognize it.

“You never answered my question,” he says.

“I can’t,” she says. She goes back to scanning through the memories in her hands, reviewing her mother’s early life on fast-forward. “My memory is perfect, as a side-effect of my fruit. I remember perfectly every time I’ve spoken with my mother. For anyone else, I’m likely to miss a time or two I was not there.”

Katakuri nods, understanding, not disappointed, only accepting of what is.

Again, she has fallen back on truth.

Again, it has not hurt her.

“But,” she says. “If I take out only the clearest moments, you will still be less important to her. She will be more likely to forget.”

“That’s better than I hoped for,” he says. “Do it.”

He tells her the names of the siblings in question and she memorizes them.

Traitors.

Family.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ go the scissors, and Pudding doesn’t think.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ and they all disappear, like they were never there in the first place.

Only from their mother’s mind.

But who else has a say?

The Katakuri in her mother’s memories is small and wild with pointy edges, and Pudding says, “You were always here, with her.”

“So I’m old enough to choose not to be.”

That might be true.

Pudding doesn’t know what makes sense anymore.

“You must know Mama as well as anyone does.”

“I don’t know if anyone knows her well.”

Pudding holds their mother’s whole past in her hands, and she’s not so sure.

“Does she love us, you think?”

Katakuri doesn’t answer.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ go the scissors. A face here, a child there. All so easily removed.

The floor becomes covered in cut-outs of children seen through their mother’s eyes, and Pudding doesn’t want to look closer, doesn’t want to know what emotion she might see.

Katakuri doesn’t answer, until he does.

“She loves us,” he says. “She loves us, but I don’t think she knows how to love.”

Truth, again.

_Snip, snip, snip._

“The picture,” says Pudding. “Mother Carmel. I think Mama killed her.”

_Snip, snip, snip._

“I don’t think she knows.”

“One of her fits?”

“Yes. When she was very young.”

“How do you know?”

“She doesn’t remember.” _Snip, snip, snip._ “But the memories are still there.”

One memory after another, her siblings disappear from her mother’s mind, left only in the background, half-remembered shadows.

It’s easy. Memory is so fragile.

Pudding can read and edit in perfect clarity, but when remembered, it’s all blurred and imagined. It’s how she can edit in a memory from someone else as a replacement without it seeming out of place. The emotions are the important part, not the details of what was seen and heard.

“Was she ever loved, do you know?” Katakuri asks.

“I don’t know,” says Pudding. “I don’t know if I know what love looks like.” And then she says, “No,” says, “Do you know? What it looks like?”

“I’ve been learning,” says Katakuri. “It’s hard to find around here. Mama tries, at least.”

“Does she?” Pudding asks.

She’s leaning over her work, fringe sweeping aside so she can watch with all three eyes, and when she raises her head, she knows he can see.

“She tries,” he says again. “She just doesn’t know how. I’ve recognized, over the years, how she loves. I know why I’m the only one of my year she never married off.”

He tugs his scarf down, then, so she can see.

She knew already what was hidden underneath, has seen it in their mother’s earlier memories of him, now scattered on the floor. It’s the defiance in the action that shocks her, when she recognizes it as like her own when she brushes her bangs aside.

“The only ones she marries off are the normal human ones,” he says. “She didn’t promise away Praline until there was another of the merfolk to give her to. It’s not for our happiness, it’s because she doesn’t believe anyone outside the norm could or should ever be accepted.”

“And the grand, unified Tottoland, where everyone is equal?”

“She tries. She knows the words. She doesn’t understand them.”

He tugs his scarf back up. She lets her bangs fall back over her forehead.

It’s the same movement.

They’ve both hidden for far too long to feel safe so soon.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ go the scissors in the silence left between them.

“There’s a reason she’s putting so much hope into finding a way to make people into giants,” he says. “Mama loves her strange and rare creatures, but she cannot truly accept anyone who isn’t exactly like herself.”

“We’re just collector’s items,” Pudding says, truth dropping from her lips.

There has been altogether too much truth today. It’s clogging up the air, but Pudding’s lies, which once came to her as easy as breathing, are nowhere to be found.

_Snip, snip, snip._

She finds the birth of Lola and Chiffon, and her scissors rest, sharp edge against the film, for a moment, and then she smudges out their faces instead.

Let their mother forget who she’s hounding, but never what she’s done.

Katakuri rests back, looks up towards the ceiling lamps. “When you’re shown more respect from a mortal enemy than your own mother, what can you do but leave?”

And Pudding shudders, nearly cuts herself on her scissors.

Too much truth in this room.

It’s raw against her skin.

“This is about them for you as well, then,” she whispers.

“Straw Hat,” he confirms.

How can so few people, just half a tiny crew, upset a whole world so easily?

Pudding’s world is broken, sunlight shining through the cracks, and she cannot live here any longer.

“They don’t care at all,” he says. “Straw Hat saw all my deepest shames, and I didn’t know for sure he’d even noticed until much later. It was like it meant nothing to him. I didn’t know it was possible, and now all I want is to find it again.”

The scissors are still.

She’s shaking too much to use them.

“Sanji cared,” she says, and her voice breaks once at his name and once to cut her off.

She cannot control herself. She always could, before, but truth has infected her. Truth, and the endless, unrelenting longing that can only be love.

“Sanji noticed. He knew already, knew I was going to kill him, and still he-” Tears are running down her nose and cheeks from all of her eyes, and she cannot stop it. “Still he called me _beautiful_.”

“So that is why you fell,” he says. “I’d wondered.”

He lets her cry.

“Tch,” says a voice. “You never knew how to comfort people.”

Brûlée steps out of the mirror on the wall. She’s brusque, but smiling, and Pudding won’t be scared of her.

Not when Brûlée crouches down and puts a warm hand on her back, hushing her quietly.

“There, there. It’s not so bad, is it?”

And the warmth on her back is an anchor, where the rest of her is in flux. She holds onto it, and she settles.

She wills her hands to move again.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ and the warmth on her back stays where it is.

She’s sitting between her mother and two siblings old enough they might as well be her parents.

One brings warmth, another company, and the third only pain and fear.

_Snip, snip, snip._

“I’m a liar,” she says. “Always. I live behind half a dozen masks, and I always have, but I can’t anymore, and I don’t know what my face looks like under them.”

There’s too much truth in this room.

It’s choking her, and yet it drags her words out with every breath, dragging her soul out through her mouth with them.

Brûlée runs a gentle hand over her head, chuckling softly. “Maybe you’ll find it’s an ugly face, and maybe you won’t, but either way it’ll be yours, won’t it?”

Nothing makes sense anymore.

Nothing has made sense since the day of her wedding.

Pudding has a perfect memory.

She can’t remember ever feeling this uncertain.

Can’t remember ever feeling this sure.

_Snip, snip, snip,_ go the scissors, cutting bonds of broken love, setting them free.


End file.
